A thin film transistor (hereinafter, TFT) and an electronic circuit using the TFT is manufactured by stacking various thin films such as a semiconductor, an insulator, or a conductor over a substrate, and forming appropriately a predetermined pattern by photolithography technique. The photolithography technique means technique of transferring a pattern such as a circuit made from a material that does not transmit light formed over a transparent plane surface referred to as a photomask to a substrate by utilizing light. The photolithography technique is widely used in a manufacturing process for a semiconductor integrated circuit and the like.
In a manufacturing process using the conventional photolithography technique, many processes such as exposing, developing, baking or exfoliating are required to handle a mask pattern formed by using a photosensitive organic resin material referred to as a photoresist. Therefore, the increase of the number of the photolithography processes inevitably leads to the increase of a manufacturing cost. In order to solve such problems, it has been tried to manufacture a TFT by a method with reduced number of the photolithography processes (Unexamined Patent Publication No. 11-251259).
However, the technique disclosed by Unexamined Patent Publication No. 11-251259 does not contribute to reduce drastically the number of processes, since a part of the photolithography processes performed at a plurality of times in a TFT manufacturing process is merely substituted by a printing process. A photolithography machine, which is used for transferring a mask pattern in the photolithography process, is a machine for transferring a pattern of 1 micron or less by means of same magnification projection exposure or reduced projection exposure. In principle, it is technically-difficult that a large substrate having a side of 1 meter or more is exposed at one time by the photolithography machine.